Moon

January 25, 2016

Greetings from la bella luna,

“We ran as if to meet the moon,”  Robert Frost

There is something special about being in bed on a cold morning, the blankets pulled up to your chin, looking at the frost on the window.  Knowing outside it is cold enough to make your teeth hurt. It would be crazy to be out there in that when one could be nested in a pile of pillows and quilts, a moment away from dreams.

That thought crossed my mind, and if anyone had been looking out their window as I ran by in the predawn darkness, they might have used synonyms for ‘crazy’ but the sentiment would be the same.

The moon was over my house.  It was a near perfect circle of white in the sky; no corona, no cloud shadow, nothing to take away from its presence.  It was as if someone had cut a hole in the inky backdrop and let the light of tomorrow shine through. 

My feet sounded louder than normal.  Maybe my soles were still stiff from the cold, slapping on the pavement like clown shoes.  I tried to relax my body to run more smoothly but my leg muscles ignored me, contracted by winter’s grip.  Fwap fwap, fwap fwap, fwap fwap…

At the end of my street I saw the moon had followed me.  It was no longer over my house but over the road I turned on next.  I was grateful for the light, I could better see the patches of ice on the road, but it unnerved me that it should go to such trouble.

I glanced to the left and saw three deer.  They were frozen in mid-stride by the moonlight.  Their heads did not move as I went by but I could feel their eyes follow me.  I could hear them thinking; ‘Crazy’.

I glanced back at the white disc in the sky and remembered the book ‘Goodnight Moon’, one of my children’s favorite books.  My kids, maybe all kids, as they learned to speak, loved saying the word ‘moon’.  When they saw it in the sky they would point and say emphatically ‘MOON!’ as if they discovered it.

I trudged, inspiring to live up to the gracefulness of the deer-peer, but failing, pulled into each step by unforgiving gravity.

There many people who make a strong connection between insanity and the full moon.  Science resists this notion, but ironically emergency room physicians will testify to its truth.  Fifteen centuries ago ‘lunacy’ was a literal reference to the madness brought on by the moon.  People thought that the position of the planets, particularly our closest neighbor in the sky, affected human disposition.

Crazy, right?  I ran with the moon behind me for a few miles, feeling it looking over my shoulder, putting a gray rendition of me on the pavement, wondering what was it about me that fascinated it so.  I turned left and looked up and the moon followed me.

The morning before I heard a news story about storms and the reporter talked about the full moon and the tide being lower than usual.  Some faraway location where water was not frozen in place.  The moon’s gravity pulls the water of our planet, teases it up from our own gravity, peeling it back from warm shores like a blanket on a chilly morning. The thought struck me as archaic, naïve. That’s what makes our tides?  That seems crazy, I thought.  Lunacy.

Another mile and I turned again, back west to face the moon, which was now hovering over this road.  I looked down, a little self-conscious now, feeling like this was really too much.  What if someone noticed; looked out their window and saw the moon was sliding all over the sky just to light my way? 

I could feel this week of running piled up in my legs.  Aches in my thighs, a twinge of pain in my calf, the unwilling joints, all made less responsive in the winter morning.  Perhaps it’s not this week, I thought, but the five decades before it that is piling up.  I shook my head like a two year old resisting creamed carrots, and the thought rattled loose and slipped away and froze in the brittle air and shattered on the pavement behind me.

The moon seemed to be brighter, more intense.  It seemed closer now, I could see its shape, see the fall of its horizon.  I felt it pull me; I am mostly water, why wouldn’t its gravitational effect move me like the enormous bed of ocean it pushes each day?  I was lifted just slightly from the pavement, just enough to silence the slapping of the clown shoes.  I glided along the road, warmer in the silvery magic light, freed just enough from the earth’s pull to run as I was designed to run

I looked up to thank the moon and saw what it was trying to show me all morning.  It was so obvious and somehow in all the years I have run under this friend, all the years it has given me that tidal lift, I had missed it until now.

On the face of the bold white disc were the grey markings I have seen for all my life but somehow had not seen.  There on the lower right side was the silhouette of a runner in midstride frozen on the moon’s face.  One hand cocked back, the other just in front, his legs hidden by the slope of the moon’s shape.

“MOON!” I shouted, and I laughed and picked up the pace, running to catch the moon when it got close enough to the horizon so I could thank it properly. 

Hope this finds you running like crazy,

  

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith